32 Queer Networks

When Sophie Le-Phat Ho invited me to join .dpi’s editorial commitee in January 2013, I had no idea that a year later I would be taking on the role of acting editor-in-chief for the three most recent editions of the journal. This new issue ends a publishing cycle spanning the period from 2004 to 2015. .dpi has evolved a great deal since it was created, and has positioned itself effectively as a platform and a cultural space that is critical and open; it has become essential to the discourse surrounding today’s feminist artists connected with the digital arts. The mandate of .dpi is to meet an existing need and to make links within a very specific community. The .dpi website continues to be an impressive resource, archiving lots of high-quality content.

Queers on the early Web found each other across cultural and material borders to create online identities, develop novel forms of pleasure, and create networked cultures. This idealistic era promised that homos and genderqueers would find emancipation in online communities, which would embrace our ‘true’ selves that we might otherwise hide in ‘real’ life. Twenty years after the birth of the modern Internet—in this era of Grindr, amateur porn, and selfies—such rosy prospects are now balanced by a sense of the limitations of the technologies that we have integrated into daily life. We are reticent of the online promise to transcend our offline selves—raced, sexed, classed, and gendered as they are.